Elephant Archer (Age of Empires II)

"Indian unique unit. Heavy mounted archer."

—Age of Empires II description

The Elephant Archer is the first unique unit of the Indians in Age of Empires II HD: The Forgotten. It is a heavy cavalry archer with low speed but very high hit points.

Elephant Archers can be upgraded to Elite Elephant Archers in the Imperial Age.

Tactics Edit

Elephant Archers have high HP and pierce armor, and deal the same amount of damage as Cavalry Archers. Like all Elephants, Elephant Archers move quite slowly, even more so than foot archers, but they are still faster than War Elephants.

Elephant Archers have more HP than any other Archer in the game, including the War Wagon. They pack the durability of a War Elephant into a powerful package with the range and attack of a Cavalry Archer. Their extremely high HP and pierce armor makes the Elephant Archer function much like a mobile tower with the advantage that they can be healed by Monks.

Because of their high pierce armor, they are also good as an anti-archer unit. However, as elephants they are extremely vulnerable to Pikemen. Unlike most other archers, they are quite good at destroying buildings.

Even though Elephant Archers fare far better against enemy Monks than Persian War Elephants do due to their range, they still struggle against Monks. Like the Persians, the Indians also lack Heresy, a circumstance that furthers that issue.

While Elephant Archers might look strong at first glance, they are a highly situational and rarely used unit (in one on one games). This has three main reasons:

• They are hard to mass, due to their high cost and the fact that they can only be trained at the Castle, and archers are at their best in large numbers.
• Their low speed takes away the main advantage of other cavalry archers, being able to outmaneuver slower units like infantry or Elite Skirmishers. Once Halberdiers can come close they shred Elephant Archers, and the slow Elephant has little means to escape.
• They have many vulnerabilities, due to them being in a total of five armor classes, the most of any unit in the game. This gives the opponent a wide array of units they can use against the Elephant Archer, depending on their civilization's strengths and overall game plan.

This combination of factors makes them function better in tandem with other units, to balance their relative strengths and weaknesses. While alone, their short range and weakness to the Spearman line make them relatively weak, when combined with other archer units, their short range automatically places them in the ideal position to tank enemy damage, while the other archer units or Hand Cannoneers quickly eliminate any threatening infantry. In return, their extremely high health and pierce armor make them a very effective defensive unit, absorbing damage that would otherwise quickly kill their companion archer units.

Even a very small number of Elephant Archers can dramatically increase the durability of a group of archers at a relatively low cost in terms of damage and resources. For example, a group of 40 Hand Cannoneers is easily defeated by a group of 40 Elite Skirmishers, but a group of 34 Hand Cannoneers and 3 Elite Elephant Archers will instead win the same fight for the same cost. In this manner, they function similarly to Battering Rams, with the advantage of being cheaper, faster, more resistant to most types of melee damage, and healable by Monks or in Castles.

However, even in their ideal scenario, a player should not expect to use more than a ratio of 1 Elephant Archer to 10 other archers.

Further statistics Edit

As Elephant Archers are unique to the Indians, only technologies that are available to them are shown in the following table:

Unit strengths and weaknesses
Strong vs.	Slow non-ranged units, archers, buildings
Weak vs.	Pikemen, Kamayuks, Berserks, Genoese Crossbowmen, Huskarls, Mamelukes, Camel Riders, Skirmishers, Eagle Warriors, Samurai, Monks
Upgrades
Hit points	Bloodlines (+20)
Attack	Fletching (+1)  Bodkin Arrow (+1)  Bracer (+1)  Chemistry (+1)  Parthian Tactics (+2 attack against Spearmen)
Range	Fletching (+1)  Bodkin Arrow (+1)  Bracer (+1)
Firing rate	Thumb Ring (+18%)
Accuracy	Ballistics (hit moving targets)
Armor	Padded Archer Armor (+1/+1)  Leather Archer Armor (+1/+1)  Ring Archer Armor (+1/+2)  Parthian Tactics (+1/+2)
Speed	Husbandry (+10%)
Conversion defense	Faith
Creation speed	Conscription (+33%)
Upgrades	Elite Elephant Archer